The virtues of conservatism have to be explained

The Tories have a very particular issue to address: people genuinely think that they hate the poor

We need to start teaching conservatism in schools. I know, I know: politics is supposed to stay out of the classroom. But it’s only conservatives who abide by that rule, leaving a vacuum that the Left is filling. And I’m convinced this is not only behind the love shown for Jeremy Corbyn by young voters in the election, but also the hate that was thrown at Tories.

An investigation for The Telegraph has revealed that Conservative candidates were assaulted, sent death threats and forced to request police protection.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to Left-wingers, too: last year, Jo Cox, a Labour MP, was murdered by a nationalist. And has there ever been a time when Tories weren’t called heartless monsters? It looks absurd when conservatives claim the status of a persecuted minority.

But there’s no escaping the ugliness that The Telegraph uncovered or the sheer amount of it. Byron Davies, the Tory candidate in Gower, says that when the election was called “it was like throwing a switch… I got a deluge of rude, offensive, four-letter word messages.” Next, he was confronted in the street. Then came the death threats: “One of them said if I was seen again in a particular area I would be hung up.” In case after case, there’s a link between hostility and the misrepresentation of Tory policies. Our reporter, Ben Riley-smith, tweeted a link to his investigation and many replies suggested that the Tories brought it on themselves. To quote one: “Maybe if they didn’t spend their political careers destroying people’s lives, then they wouldn’t be unpopular? Just a thought.”

A stupid thought, as it happens, but a common one. Incivility in politics might be a bipartisan problem, but conservatives have a very particular issue to address: people genuinely think that Tories hate the poor.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes an experiment he conducted in which he asked conservatives and socialists to explain their own philosophies. He then asked them to describe each other’s. Conservatives got socialists almost to a tee. Socialists got conservatives wrong – and their lack of empathy worsened the more Left-wing they were.

Haidt has a complex social theory to explain this. My version is far simpler: Leftists incline towards the heart, Tories towards the head.

Conservatives can describe what socialists want because conservatives want those things too: good schools and hospitals, an end to poverty, no war, clean air. But the Right looks at the Left’s programme and they see it ending in failure, in large part because the Left is blind to the sad facts of human nature. If you tax the rich too much, they’ll move abroad. Make welfare too generous and some folks, God bless ’em, will just choose not to work. Etc.

This is all common sense, and that’s part of the problem. Conservatism isn’t very poetic; it assumes people will just grow into it. Worse: some Tories are embarrassed by their own ideas and won’t make the case for them lest they are rumbled as Tory. The Government appears to have given up altogether. Into the gap steps the righteous Left, which is amply represented in schools and universities by the staff. One preelection survey found that 72 per cent of secondary school teachers intended to vote Labour, 10 per cent Lib Dem and just 8 per cent Conservative.

I’m not claiming there’s a conspiracy to brainwash our youth, nor am I saying that Left-wing voting is entirely irrational: teachers and students have legitimate concerns about services and jobs that have pushed them towards Corbyn. What I am saying is that the Right is not making an alternative pitch for people’s hearts – and it’s because they’ve given up on the culture war.

Where is the latter-day GK Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis? We need a new conservative intellectual movement. We need conservative books, films, TV, Youtube channels etc. We do not need a literal propaganda campaign in education – that would be the least conservative demand to make – but Tories do have a right to demand equal time, if only to equip children with the ability to comprehend alternative points of view.

And this is not simply about exposing young minds to ancient economic theories. It’s about encouraging an appreciation for historical experience and critical analysis, which are the fundamentals of conservatism. Doubt is essential to a good society. Not the self-loathing of the Left, but quiet resistance to utopian thinking. If you want to revive conservative thought in the classroom, teach the history of socialist revolutions. They all end in disaster.

Conservatism is not a purely negative point-of-view: it has an ethic of personal responsibility worth celebrating. The Tory candidates who ran a gauntlet of abuse embody that spirit of public service: society won’t fix itself, so the individual has to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. In that sense, the best conservative politicians teach us all by example. FOLLOW Tim Stanley on Twitter @timothy_stanley; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion